Super Eagles’ Coach, Gernot Rohr, at the weekend admitted that much still needed to be done on the national team to get it ready for the task of qualifying for the Russia 2018 World Cup. But he added that the task has been made easy by the abundance of talents available to him.
Speaking after Nigeria managed a 1-0 defeat of Tanzania in a Gabon 2017 African Nations Cup qualifier, Rohr said the team’s performance against the Taifa Stars was encouraging, adding, however, that the attack and defence still needed a lot of fine-tuning to get it in the right shape.
Nigeria will play its first Russia 2018 World Cup qualifier against Zambia next month in Ndola. Speaking on the Eagles, Rohr said he was impressed by the movement of the defenders, adding that he only needs to correct their positioning to get that area right.
He said: “Leon Balogun did very well, but I know he could do that and even more, so I wasn’t in anyway surprised, but the player who made me proud was Musa Mohammed.“He didn’t play like he was making his competitive debut, to me he was one of the many positives I saw in the game, he did very well and I am happy for him.”
“If there is anything I wasn’t happy about, it was the numerous chances we failed to convert, it shows we still have work to do in terms of scoring goals, not much work since we are creating the chances.”
The German admits that it would take the Eagles sometime to get back their rhythm, saying, “a team that failed to qualify for the AFCON need confidence and the confidence is coming back gradually.
“We played well and any team that created 12, 14 chances in a match, that tells you it’s a good team.“We were wasteful but we will work on our finishing.”The coach believes the inclusion of the injured Alex Iwobi and Oghenekaro Etebo would make the team more competitive.
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